Will the end of the Conservatives kill off the bonkbuster?

If you’re still wondering what 14 years of sleaze-filled Tory rule has done for the country, there is at least one reason to be cheerful – the revival of racy beach-reads in which sex-mad, bed-hopping MPs are caddish anti-heroes. We’ll miss them when they’re gone, says Joanne Ella Parsons

In ‘Cleavage’, former Tory aide Cleo Watson’s latest bonkbuster, the prime minister is nearly caught looking at the ‘Blue Balls and Bazookas’ website (Getty/iStock)

Don’t think too long or too hard about this – because, trust me, it’s not an image you’ll want in your head – but Conservative politicians are synonymous with sex. Whenever they are in government, Tory “sexploits” are routinely splashed across tabloids and broadsheets. As a class, they seem unable to resist an opportunity to highlight the gap between their party’s supposed traditional, family values and their extra-curricular bedroom activity.

So it is perhaps unsurprising that the Conservatives have a rich shared history with the bonkbuster. Because, just like the Tory party – with its associations in the public mind with privilege, pomposity and self-interest – the ruthless protagonists in these pacy and racy doorstopper novels, which are often read from behind sunglasses and next to a swimming pool while on a foreign holiday, like to bed-hop and wife-swap with exhausting frequency.

Rishi Sunak raised quizzical eyebrows after declaring he was a fan of Jilly Cooper, but is evidently so enamoured with her work that last year he slipped the queen of the bonkbuster an OBE for “services to literature”. Rivals, perhaps her most-thumbed and steamiest novel, and a bestseller in the Thatcher years, is shortly to appear as a miniseries on Disney+, with actor Alex Hassell as the roguish philandering Tory MP, Rupert Campbell-Black.